The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (48 page)

Four more women would disappear before Vancouver police were prompted to take an interest in the case. Twenty-three-year-old Jacqueline McDonnell disappeared in mid-January 1998 and was reported missing on 22 February 1999 and 46-year-old Inga Monique Hall was last seen alive in February 1998 and reported missing on 3 March.

Twenty-nine-year-old mother-of-two Sarah Jane deVries was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings in the early morning of 14 April 1998 and reported missing by friends later the same day.

“This started when she was 12,” said her mother Pat. “She has HIV, she has hepatitis C. What I do for her now is look after her kids the best I can.”

When Sarah went missing, her children were seven and two.

“It’s very hard to tell a seven-year-old that somebody is missing,” said Pat. “It’s something you can’t come to terms with, you can’t work through, because there’s never an end to it.”

Nobody has seen or heard from her since. This was unprecedented as she always called on her mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and her own birthday.

Ex-boyfriend Wayne Leng said Sarah underwent “a lot of turmoil” in her 29 years, particularly as she was a child of mixed parentage adopted by an all-white family on the West Side. As Sarah herself observed in a diary she left behind: “I think my hate is going to be my destination, my executioner.”

Leng put up posters around the Vancouver’s Downtown East-side carrying Sarah’s picture and details of a $1000 reward. But three phone calls he got on his pager around midnight one Saturday night left him chilled.

“Sarah’s dead,” said a man’s slightly slurred voice, with music pounding in the background. “So there will be more girls like her dead. There will be more prostitutes killed. There will be one every Friday night. At the busiest time.”

The second message featured the same voice and had the same music playing in the background.

“You’ll never find Sarah again,” the man said. “So just stop looking for her, all right? She doesn’t want to be seen and heard from again, all right? So, ’bye. She’s dead.”

The final message said: “This is in regard to Sarah. I just want to let you know that you’ll never find her again alive because a friend of mine killed her and I was there.”

Leng said the mystery caller knew things about Sarah deVries not known by many others.

Sheila Catherine Egan was 20 when she vanished in July 1998. Her disappearance was reported on 5 August. She had been a prostitute since the age of 15.

In September 1998, a First Nations’ group sent the authorities a list of women they said had been murdered in Downtown East-side and demanded a thorough investigation. The police responded by saying that some of those listed had moved away and were still alive. Others had died from drug overdoses or disease. However, the complaint prompted Detective Dave Dickson to take a second look at the list of all the Low Track women who had simply disappeared without a trace. By now it had enough names on it to persuade Dickson’s superiors to allow him to set up a cold-case task force.

Throwing its net wide, the task-force started with 40 cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to find a pattern, the roster was narrowed to 16 prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time the task force made its first arrest the number had climbed to at least 54 women, who had vanished between 1983 and 2001. By then the task force had swelled to 85.

In the last three months of 1998, while the task force was compiling old cases, four more Low Track prostitutes vanished. Thirty-one-year-old Julie Louise Young was last seen alive in October 1998 and finally reported missing on 1 June 1999. Drug-addict Angela Rebecca Jardine was 28 when she went missing, but she was mentally handicapped and had the mind of a 10-year-old child. She had been working Low Track’s streets since she was 20. Last seen between 3.30 and 4 p.m. on 20 November 1998 at a rally of around 700 people in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she was reported missing on 6 December. Twenty-nine-year-old Michelle Gurney, a Native American, disappeared in December 1998 and was reported missing on the 22nd. Twenty-year-old Marcella Helen Creison got out of jail on 27 December 1998. She was last seen at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning around the corner from the Drake Hotel and never returned to the apartment where her mother and boyfriend were waiting with unopened Christmas presents. She was reported missing on 11 January 1999.

The task force’s investigations were given added impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes.

First the task force had to decide if there was a serial killer at large in Vancouver. Inspector Kim Rossmo was convinced there was. The founder of the “geographic profiling” later used in the “Freeway Phantom” case, he was then working for the Vancouver Police Department. He mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Geographic profiles work on the premise that most serial criminals operate close to home. By analyzing the spatial patterns of the attacks, it is said to be possible to trace one serial killer to within two-fifths of a mile of his home. The idea came from studying the way African lions hunt, which almost perfectly matches the predations of a serial killer. Lions look for an animal that exhibits some indication of weakness – the old, the very young, the infirm, the vulnerable – then they go to a watering hole and wait, because they know their potential victim will be drawn there.

“We see that all the time with criminal offenders,” says Rossmo, now a Research Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. “They go to target-rich environments to do their hunting. Spatial patterns are produced by serial killers as they search and attack. The system analyzes the geography of these, the victim encounter, the attack, the murder and body dumpsites.”

In May 1999 Rossmo spotted an unusual concentration of disappearances in Downtown Eastside. However, his superiors dismissed his conclusions, insisting that some of the missing women had left Vancouver voluntarily. Rossmo resigned, but he went on to establish geographic profiling as a respected technique used worldwide to track serial killers.

The task force were further hampered by the fact that Canada’s “Violent Crime Linkage System” did not track missing persons unless there was some evidence of foul play – and none had been found in the cases of the missing women so far. And the data was incomplete. In some cases, the police did not even have a date when the woman had gone missing, and prostitutes and pimps were reluctant to co-operate with officers who would ordinarily put them in jail. However, in June 1999, investigators met with relatives of several missing women. They reviewed police and coroners’ databases throughout Canada and the United States, and checked drug rehabilitation facilities, hospitals, mental institutions, AIDS hospices, witness-protection programmes and cemetery records, looking for evidence that women on the list might still be alive or had perished from natural causes.

Disturbing news came from Agassiz, 60 miles to the east of Vancouver, where the bodies of four prostitutes had been dumped in 1995 and 1996. None of them were on the Low Track list. And in Edmonton, capital of the adjoining province of Alberta, the police believe a serial killer might be connected to the bodies of 12 prostitutes found around that city since 1986.

Some women who made the list were then discovered alive. Twenty-two-year-old Patricia Gay Perkins left Low Track and her one-year-old son in an effort to make a new life for herself. No one was concerned and it was 18 years before she was reported missing in 1996. She then appeared on the published list of the Vancouver’s missing prostitutes. On 17 December 1999, she phoned from Ontario to tell the police she was alive and drug-free.

Fifty-year-old Rose Ann Jensen was found in December 1999. She disappeared in October 1991. Reported as missing soon after, she made the list in 1998. The following year, police discovered that she was alive and living in Toronto when they were scanning a national health-care database.

Linda Jean Coombes was reported missing twice – once in August 1994 and again in April 1999. However, she had died of a heroin overdose on 15 February 1994. Her body arrived in Vancouver’s morgue without identification. She was so wasted that her own mother did not even recognize a photograph of her. But she was eventually identified in September 1999 by DNA and removed from the list.

Karen Anne Smith was reported missing on 27 April 1999, but was removed from the list when it was discovered that she had in fact died of heart failure in hospital in Edmonton on 13 February 1999. Twenty-four-year-old Anne Wolsey was reported missing by her mother on 1 January 1997. In March 2002, her father called from Montreal to tell police his daughter was alive and well.

Although five names were removed from the list of missing women, more were added and it became clear to the task force that some of the women must have been the victims of foul play. The police then began to look for suspects among men with a history of violence against prostitutes. Suspicion fell on 36-year-old Michael Leopold, who had been arrested in 1996 for assaulting a Low Track streetwalker. He had beaten her and tried to force a rubber ball down her throat, though was scared off when a passer-by heard the girl’s screams. Although he told a court-appointed psychiatrist about his fantasies of raping and murdering prostitutes, more went missing while he was being held. He was eventually absolved of any involvement in the disappearances, but was sentenced to 14 years in prison for aggravated assault.

Another suspect was 43-year-old Barry Thomas Neidermier, a native of Alberta. He had been convicted of pimping a 14-year-old girl in 1990, which seems to have left him with a grudge against prostitutes. In April 2000, he was arrested for violent attacks on seven Downtown Eastside prostitutes. The charges against him include abduction, unlawful imprisonment, assault, sexual assault, theft and administering a noxious substance. While none of Neidermier’s victims appeared on the missing list, he was considered “a person of interest”.

Then there was the unidentified rapist who attacked a 38-year-old woman outside her Low Track hotel in August 2001. During the attack, the assailant boasted that he had raped and killed other women in the Downtown Eastside. And there were others. The Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society compiled a daily “bad date” file, recording reports by local prostitutes of “Johns” who attacked or threatened them.

Towards the end of 1998, 37-year-old Bill Hiscox told the police of the goings on at the pig farm in Port Coquitlam just outside Vancouver owned by David Francis and Robert William “Willie” Pickton. The brothers also owned a salvage firm in Surrey, southeast of Vancouver. Hiscox got the job through a relative who had been a girlfriend of Robert Pickton in 1997. He had to go out to the pig farm to pick up his pay-cheques and described it as “a creepy-looking place”.

After reading newspaper reports on Vancouver’s missing women, Hiscox grew suspicious of the Pickton brothers, particularly as Robert Pickton was “a pretty quiet guy” who drove a converted bus with deeply tinted windows. The brothers also ran a registered charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. A non-profit society, its official mandate was to “organize, coordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups”. In fact, the Piggy Palace – a converted building at the hog farm – was a drinking club for local bikers which featured “entertainment” provided by Low Track prostitutes.

Police were already aware of the Pickton brothers. David Pickton had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992, fined $1,000 and given 30 days’ probation. Pickton attacked the victim in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. Soon after Piggy Palace opened, the Port Coquitlam authorities sued the Pickton brothers and their sister, Linda Louise Wright, for violating local zoning laws. Their farm was designated for agricultural use, but they had converted a farm building “for the purpose of holding dances, concerts and other recreations” that drew as many as 1,800 persons. After a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1998, the Picktons were served with an injunction banning future parties and the Piggy Palace Good Times Society was stripped of its non-profit status.

Robert “Willie” Pickton was charged with attempted murder on 23 March 1997 after Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a drug addict and prostitute with a wild and reckless past, was rescued from the roadside by a couple driving past the pig farm at 1.45 a.m. She was partially clothed, had been stabbed several times and was covered in blood.

Earlier in the evening, Pickton had picked her up and driven her to the pig farm, According to a police report, Pickton then “did attempt to commit the murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, by stabbing her repeatedly with . . . a brown-handled kitchen knife”. She has been handcuffed at the time, but had managed to grab the knife, stab Pickton and escape. He later showed up at Eagle Ridge Hospital, where he was treated for one stab wound.

A provincial court judge released Pickton on a $2,000 cash bond with the undertaking that he stay at the farm and not have any contact with Ms Eistetter.

“You are to abstain completely from the use of alcohol and non-prescription drugs,” the judge ordered.

“I don’t take them,” Pickton replied.

A trial date was set, but the charges were stayed before the matter went to court because the attorney-general’s office decided “there was no likelihood of conviction”. Despite the grievous wounds Wendy Eistetter suffered, she was a prostitute and, therefore, an “unreliable witness”.

Though Pickton had walked free, the stabbing had convinced Hiscox that Pickton was responsible for “all the girls that are going missing . . . [Pickton] frequents the downtown area all the time, for girls”. Hiscox told the police: “All the purses and IDs are out there in his trailer.”